Sylvester Graham was an American Presbyterian minister (ordained in
1826) who preached on temperance and stressed whole-wheat flour and vegetarian
diets. He was known for his graham crackers. His Graham Journal of Health
and Longevity preached his principles of good health. He compared people
physiologically to orangutans, and concluded that vegetarian food was
natural for both primates.

Graham had many devoted followers, known as Grahamites, who slavishly
followed his principles, which included temperance, sexual restraint,
and baths, in addition to vegetarianism. He was so famous that his lectures
on proper living were attended by thousands, and he was able to hold his
audiences spellbound. He had many disciples who also worked diligently
to further the vegetarian cause. When the British
Vegetarian Society was founded in 1847, he helped found a similar
group in America (see American
Vegetarian Society ).- Richard Schwartz

In 1831 and 1832, at the invitation of New York's temperance leadership,
Philadelphia activist Sylvester Graham delivered lectures on the relationship
between diet and disease. New Yorkers, Graham argued, had been fatally
weakened in their ability to resist epidemics by the improper eating habits
spawned by big-city life. Graham opposed the use of stimulants--not only
liquor, wine, and cider but tea, coffee, and tobacco too. He advocated
vegetarianism. He denounced urban bakers who used 'refined' flour--stripped
of husks and dark oleaginous germ and whitened with 'chemical agents'--because
it baked more quickly than traditional bread, even though the result was
an almost crustless loaf without granular texture or nutritional value.
He railed, too, against marketplace milk, much of which came from cows
fed on leftover distillery mash (swill), with the anemic, liquor-inflected
product made presentable by the addition of chalk, plaster of Paris, and
molasses.from Burrows, Edwin G. and Mike Wallace, _Gotham: A History of New
York City to 1898_; New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999